Nowt so queer ...

Tunng consists of two guitarists, a guy doing electronics and a bloke who plays the seashells with his toes. Some people say their brand of 'new folk' could be the next big thing. So why do the genre's fans hate them? Alexis Petridis on the battle for the soul of British folk

It has, says Mike Connolly, been an eye-opening 12 months. The director of last year's exemplary BBC4 documentary series Jazz Britannia was a folk fan before he embarked on a similar project detailing the story of the postwar British folk revival. Nevertheless, the year he spent researching and filming the three-part series threw up some unlikely revelations.

"I grew up in the punk generation, so anything hippyish was completely rejected. I ended up listening to the Incredible String Band, the sort of thing that used to be anathema to me, and I can barely believe what a joy their music is." His voice takes on the delighted zeal of the recently converted. "It's so fresh and charming and free."

Connolly's conversion to the winsome authors of Cousin Caterpillar, Little Cloud and Hedgehog's Song is far from the only surprise to be sprung by Folk Britannica. Over the past century, it reveals, British folk has variously been adopted as an important tool in battling the menace of imperial Germany, a means of inciting a communist revolution, a mellifluous accompaniment to the LSD experience, cosy light entertainment, a brand of pop music, a reaction against pop music, a talisman to ward off Thatcherism, the preferred soundtrack of British fascists and a basis for stand-up comedy. Currently, and perhaps most improbably, it has been adopted in some quarters as a hot tip for the next big thing, thanks to a new wave of leftfield artists inspired by traditional music. There has been critical acclaim for Scots singer songwriters Alasdair Roberts and The Fence Collective. The former, discovered and occasionally produced by US alt-country star Bonnie Prince Billy, specialises in effortlessly dour murder ballads, while the latter is a loose aggregation of musicians based in the small town of Anstruther, Fife, which has spawned Mercury nominee KT Tunstall, James Yorkston and the remarkably productive Kenny "King Creosote" Anderson, whose last album, KC Rules OK, was his 24th in eight years. Based in the distinctly non-pastoral setting of Plumstead, medieval-influenced folk rockers Circulus have also attracted much media attention, perhaps unsurprisingly given their penchant for dressing in clothes modelled on the 15th century Duke Of Burgundy, Philip The Good.

At the other end of the musical spectrum are the "folktronic" experiments of Tunng, Adem and Four-Tet, electronic artists who in recent years have turned to more organic sounds for inspiration. "I think people have just thought, 'Fuck it, I kind of miss playing an instrument, rather than standing behind a laptop'," suggests Tunng's Mike Lindsay. "I had no idea anybody else was doing it. I had no idea what we were doing, to be honest. It was odd to discover there was a scene happening and we were kind of involved in it."

But a scene there is: in the last few years, the Green Man Festival has turned into one of the hippest and loudest-praised of the annual summer events. Hosted in Hay-On-Wye in August, its raison d'etre is neatly summed up in its merchandise, which includes a shopping bag emblazoned with the legend FOLK. Meanwhile, long-running dance-flavoured festival The Big Chill has instituted both a ceilidh and a dedicated folk stage.

Folk Britannica is presumably the first TV programme in history to seek the opinions of both David Attenborough and Shane MacGowan, and to shift from Tony Benn earnestly discussing the class struggle to the aforementioned Incredible String Band earnestly discussing the hallucinogenic properties of cough syrup.

Folk Britannica also details a lot of arguments. In fact, after watching the series, it's hard to think of another musical genre so determinedly quarrelsome, so consistently up for an internecine barney. Hip-hop may have a history of beefs and battles, but it can't match the sheer existential intensity that you find in a roomful of folkies debating the music's point and purpose, how it should be played, what it means and what it should encompass. "If you give folkies the chance to talk about folk music, they'll jump at the chance, because they're so argumentative," says Connolly. "They never shut up. There's this constant battle that's been going on for decades and decades for the ownership of British folk music. The arguments seem to be an integral part of it. Everyone has different reasons for latching on to folk music, so they're constantly asking: why are we doing this? Why is this important?"

Martin Carthy agrees. At 65, he has been a fixture on the British folk scene as a singer, multi-instrumentalist, arranger and folklorist for almost 40 years: to the outside world, he is probably most famous as the man from whom Paul Simon swiped the arrangement of Scarborough Fair and Bob Dylan borrowed the melody for Bob Dylan's Blues. He expresses a vague worry that the series might not capture the full breadth of the folk revival story, but then, if Folk Britannia had attempted to capture the full breadth of Carthy's knowledge about the subject, it would entirely consume BBC4's schedule for the rest of the decade: when I ask him about folk's unfashionable reputation, his answer veers fascinatingly between the shortcomings of the English education system in the early 20th century, a quick history of the Victorian era's radical socialist parsons, a brief and impassioned harangue on Arts Council funding, the conspiracy surrounding the 1961 assassination of Congolese president Patrice Lumumba and the foundation of the first revival morris dancing team in Thaxted in 1911. Given how much Carthy knows, picking a fight with him about folk music would seem to be a fairly suicidal undertaking, but plenty of people appear to have chanced their arm over the years. "To imagine that it's just two groups of opposing people fighting each other is just wrong," he says, cheerfully. "It's more like the left: everybody's fighting everybody else."

Indeed, the folk revival was born in an atmosphere of disagreement and heated dispute. Its founding father, the late Ewan MacColl, was a marxist who believed that Britain's traditional music - collected by the likes of Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams at the turn of the 20th century as a means of countering German cultural influence in the run-up to the second world war - could be used to propagate communism in the 1950s. MacColl emerges from Folk Britannia as a curious mix of pioneering hero and pantomime villain. "He was fantastic," remembers one interviewee. "I didn't like him much." MacColl co-founded Britain"s first-ever folk club, the Ballads and Blues Club, in 1951, and wrote the peerless Dirty Old Town and The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. However, he also gave the world the image of the British folkie as a bearded reactionary in an Aran sweater, singing with finger in ear: it's become a cartoon despised by most folk fans, but MacColl actually looked like that. When not writing wonderful songs and sticking his finger in his ear, he seems to have spent an awful lot of time bossing everyone else around, with contention predictably resulting.

"It was serious and none the worse for that," says Carthy, who went to the Ballads and Blues as a teenage skiffle fan. "It was the dogmatism that was the problem for me, which is why I was not a follower. I didn't become involved. It was apparently a dogmatic view that didn't interest me." Nevertheless, MacColl set the climate in which British folk operates. In the 55 years since the Ballad and Blues Club opened its doors, virtually no development in the genre has passed without controversy. The rise of folk rock in the late 60s upset the purists. "I always told myself there was no problem, but obviously there were people who didn't like it," remembers Carthy, who bought an electric guitar and joined Steeleye Span. (Danny Thompson, bassist with folk-rock pioneers Pentangle, claims, perhaps with his tongue in his cheek, to have received death threats.)

There has been continual friction between those who feel folk music should serve a political purpose and those attracted by what producer Joe Boyd terms "the intrinsic sexy appeal of the music". In the late 70s and early 80s, Carthy feels, "the folk scene tried to insulate itself from punk and that's when it really hit the buffers". Ian Anderson, editor of Roots, magazine, remembers it differently: "The first place I heard a Ramones record in the 70s was back at someone's place for coffee after a folk club. The first people I knew who were into the Clash were folkies; they thought, 'Hey, these people are part of us'."

You might think that after decades of neglect or outright derision from the mainstream media, the folk scene would welcome the sudden burst of interest and the new wave of folk-influenced artists with open arms. But to do so would be to ignore the unmissable opportunity for a squabble, which would hardly be in keeping with folk revival etiquette.

Instead, Adem, Roberts, Tunng and the rest have been at best treated with profound suspicion, and at worst studiously ignored by the majority of the "folk establishment". Unplayed on Mike Harding's BBC Radio 2 folk show and unheralded at the BBC Folk Awards, the new artists have set up their own parallel scene, sometimes dubbed "twisted folk" or "outsider folk" - with its own clubs and festivals.

"Have we had any response from the folk scene? No," says Mike Lindsay of Tunng, whose line-up features "two acoustic guitars and vocals, a guy doing electronics and samples and a bloke who's got a bit of rope tied between two bits of metal with seashells and a bit of wood hanging off it which he plays with his feet while he plays the clarinet". Their debut album, Mother's Daughter, was released to critical acclaim from the rock press last year. "I do think there's a slightly different tone to what we do, there's a twist on it, it's not that traditional a sound. Maybe we should make a concerted effort to make more friends."

"It probably grew up as a reaction because they could get nowhere within the established folk scene," says Carthy. "It would be nice if the BBC Folk Awards lot could invite some of these other people along. I don't really know what to do about bringing the two scenes together, except to try and get myself invited to play at some of their festivals. I don't think people are scared off by their using computers or whatever. You'd call me part of the folk establishment, and I think it's the most important thing to have happened in the past few years.

"You would think I would be very stupid if I thought that what my generation had discovered about English folk songs in the last 45 years, is it. I get called a traditionalist. I play a guitar, for Christ's sake! That was the argument when I was 20. Should you be allowed to accompany yourself on a guitar? Was it tasteful? I hate that word. I hated it then and I hate it now. If this music has survived flood, fire, plague, pestilence, war, it can survive someone plugging a computer in. It can stand anything. You can do anything with this music. I'd hate to think the door wasn't open for these artists."

Anderson suggests that the folk establishment's reluctance to embrace the twisted folk artists might have less to do with musical conservatism - "folkies are the first people to get into weird stuff because your ears are already off the mainstream" - and more to do with wariness of the media. "We've suffered decades and decades of the mainstream media taking the piss. Years ago, we used to run a column in the front of the magazine with stupid quotes from the mainstream media taking the piss out of folk singers and morris dancers. We gave it up in the end because there was so much of it, stuff about beards and sandals and fingers in the ears and hanky-waving and stuff like that. All this stuff about folk music becoming the next big thing ... It's like bestowing some recognition on folk music from the mainstream suddenly makes it valid. It's a load of nonsense. It's been there all the time. It's always interesting, never dull."

You can certainly see how someone who had endured endless jokes about pigs' bladders on sticks might look askance at, say, Circulus, whose deep and abiding love for folk and early music does not preclude their desire to dress up, as one journalist put it, "like the Knights Who Say 'Ni', off Monty Python". One common complaint about the new artists on folk messageboards and chatrooms is that their fans treat the music with a knowing, postmodern distance; as a kind of Soil Association Certified version of an ironically worn heavy metal T-shirt. Whether that's fair is a moot point, but you can understand the folkies' reluctance to associate themselves with anything deemed hip. Anderson feels that the last time folk music became popular in the mainstream, during the folk rock/singer-songwriter boom of the late 60s and early 70s, it nearly did for the entire scene: "You got a lot of people who actually weren't that bothered about the roots of the music, who just got into it because, hey, it was a way to become successful. They were interested in getting famous, not in folk music. During that period, the scene really lost its track."

It all raises an intriguing set of questions. Is it possible to enjoy music in the "wrong" way? If you question people's motivation for liking the music you like, are you guarding an important cultural tradition or just acting like a snob? They are questions you can't imagine being asked in any other genre than British folk, with its ongoing squabbles about meaning and its constant debate. "I'm really encouraged that these new guys like Alasdair Roberts have provoked an argument about the soul of folk music and what it means," says Connolly. "I think that's really healthy. I don't think we can judge at this stage what music from this generation is going to survive - it's very hard to be historical about the present. But what is apparent is that we ended the series where we started, with people arguing about the soul and ownership of folk music. And that's great"

· Folk Britannia begins on Friday on BBC4. An accompanying series of concerts, films and events takes place at the Barbican from Thursday to Saturday